At Underscore, we believe in founders and companies long before the first pitch, product, or press release. The best companies start as a question. A conviction. A willingness to chase a better way. And — most importantly — they start with a gritty go getter, committed to creating solutions.
The Pearce Summer Fellowship was created in honor of our late co-founder, John Pearce — a tireless champion of early-stage builders. His belief was simple: invest early, and invest in people. This program is one of the ways we carry that legacy forward.
Now in its first year, the Pearce Fellowship supports those with startups already in motion — and those still early in exploration. Some Fellows arrive with traction. Others are diving into discovery. All of them share one thing: the courage to begin.
This summer, we’re proud to welcome twelve Pearce Fellows and seven bold ideas into our community. They’re building across AI, healthcare, fintech, climate, and more. Each receives flexible funding, hands-on mentorship, and full access to our team and Core Community of experts. From first insight to first users, we’re in their corner. Because the future needs people brave enough to start. Here’s a sampling of those starting up!
Meet the Fellows
Jack O’Brien & Hongyin Luo — Subconscious Systems
In today’s AI landscape, agents are powerful, but technical limitations and difficulty with integration has limited their adoption. They struggle with long context, a framework that doesn’t quite fit, and large mounting expenses to process it all. For Jack O’Brien and Hongyin Luo, that’s not just a technical flaw. It’s a foundational limitation.
With Subconscious, they’re building infrastructure for a new foundation for AI agents: a family of language models that reason, use multiple tools, and engineer their own context & workflow. Their approach allows for sustained accuracy and reasoning across tool use and virtually unlimited context.
Jack O’Brien is a two-time exited founder and former tech lead at Google, bringing deep experience in product, infrastructure, and company-building. Before co-founding Subconscious, he served as a Founder in Residence at Atomic, where he led Build AI, a GPU cloud for training models powered entirely by renewable energy. Prior to that, he was CTO at Sandhill Markets (formerly Stonks.com), a platform used by thousands of early-stage founders to raise capital, and co-founded OnePager, a fundraising platform used by over 5,000 teams and later acquired by Sandhill. Jack got his MBA at MIT, his undergraduate engineering degree from Princeton, and brings to the Pearce Fellowship a blend of technical depth, product instinct, and repeat-founder resilience.
Hongyin Luo is a Research Scientist at MIT CSAIL, where he designs more efficient and transparent language models with stronger reasoning capabilities. He earned his Ph.D. from MIT EECS in 2022, working on small language models, knowledge grounding, and synthetic data. He believes in improving AI capability, efficiency, and trustworthiness via structured reasoning, and has published several academic research along this direction, including SimPLE and SAIL (2023), LangCode and Thread (2024). His mission at Subconscious is proving the new scheme for language modeling, and building the new foundation for agent development.
Goals for the Summer: This summer, Jack and Hongyin are launching the first version of their platform, delivering for their first customers, and rethinking how agents get integrated and deployed.
Christina Vosbikian — Coord Health
With millions of women in the U.S. relying on just 15 minutes a year with their OBGYN and half of providers reporting burnout, Christina Vosbikian saw more than a gap. She saw a calling.
With Coord Health, she’s building a platform that expands the reach of OBGYNs, through telehealth, smarter clinical workflows, and multidisciplinary care teams. Coord is turning fragmented, reactive care into something continuous and proactive.
With an immense opportunity spanning clinical care, payer models, and consumer health, Coord is setting the foundation for a new standard in women’s health — one that’s scalable, personal, and built to last.
Christina Vosbikian brings both operational insight and lived conviction to this mission. After graduating from Princeton, she began her career at Goldman Sachs, before moving into private equity at Berkshire Partners. Alongside her MBA studies at Harvard, she immersed herself in women’s health, contributing to growth strategy and operations at Planned Parenthood Direct and Allara Health. She founded Coord Health inspired by what she saw shadowing in clinical settings across the country as well as by what she learned from leading physicians right here in Boston. Christina was recently selected as an HBS Blavatnik Fellow in Life Science Entrepreneurship, a selective program that will support her continued work building Coord Health.
Goals for the Summer: This summer, Christina is focused on deepening Coord’s technology infrastructure: building tools to support patient engagement at scale, automating care plan matching, developing a smart messaging system, and optimizing clinical workflows. She’s also preparing the platform for enterprise partnerships, and assembling a lean technical team to accelerate development.
Ignacio Berardi & Teo Zavalía — Rexi
In fintech, infrastructure failures don’t just slow things down — they break trust. When reconciliation processes falter, entire systems are at risk. For Ignacio Berardi and Teo Zavalía , that’s not just a technical problem — it’s a call to build something better.
With Rexi, they’re developing an AI-native reconciliation platform that helps fintechs and banks detect and resolve transactional mismatches before they become critical. Their platform streamlines reconciliation across ledgers, payment systems, and bank records — replacing manual workflows with intelligent automation and audit-ready clarity.
Ignacio Berardi is an MBA graduate from Harvard Business School with a track record that reflects both depth and range. He began his career as Business Analyst Intern at NXTP Ventures, supporting portfolio companies and sourcing deals across Latin America. At Bain & Company, he led strategic projects for major financial institutions across five countries, sharpening a systems-level view of fintech infrastructure. From there, he transitioned into product leadership at Bitso, where he worked on QR payments and decentralized wallet solutions, getting hands-on experience with complex infrastructure and user-facing innovation. He then joined Resolute Ventures, before becoming Chief of Staff at Comun, where he worked closely with the CEO and CTO on strategic finance initiatives. While at Comun, he built the company’s reconciliation workflow from scratch — an experience that ultimately sparked the idea for Rexi.
Teo Zavalía recently earned his MBA from Columbia Business School and brings a background in fintech, venture, and global operations. He began his career as a Data Analyst at Digital House, building technical fluency and hands-on experience with data systems. He then joined Anheuser-Busch InBev, first as a Global Management Trainee, and later as a Planning & Performance Manager, managing high-complexity operations across a global enterprise. Teo later moved to Mercado Libre, one of Latin America’s largest tech companies, where he worked on insurtech and trade operations, gaining firsthand insight into the fragility of large-scale payment systems. During his MBA, he joined FJ Labs as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence, deepening his early-stage venture experience.
Goals for the Summer: This summer, the Rexi team is focused on advancing conversations with fintech operators and sponsor banks, completing key diligence milestones, and recruiting a technical co-founder to help scale product development.
Vineet Jammalamadaka & Feroze Mohideen
Vineet and Feroze joined the Pearce Fellowship initially exploring an AI agent platform for customs imports and brokers — a complex, high-friction space they believed was ripe for automation. But when U.S. tariff dynamics shifted, they hit pause. Rather than push forward for the sake of momentum, they chose to pivot with intention.
After exploring several industries, they’ve landed on a fresh idea and are now building in stealth, channeling their early-stage experience and hard-won perspective into this next chapter.
Vineet Jammalamadaka brings a product-driven mindset and a strong bias toward action. Over the past five years, he’s built and scaled data platforms at companies like Affinity, where he worked on relationship intelligence software, and Uber, where he began as a software engineer. Last year, he became the founding engineer at Cloud Health Systems, joining as employee #1 and helping shape the product from the ground up. Whether navigating early technical complexity or designing user workflows, Vineet is energized by ambiguity — and by the opportunity to build something foundational. He’s currently pursuing a joint MBA and a Master of Engineering at Harvard.
Feroze Mohideen brings a systems lens and deep technical fluency, with experience across engineering, data, and entrepreneurship. He’s held software development roles at Amazon, Ironclad, Porter, and Coursera. Most recently, he founded The Research Yard, a collaborative incubator supporting independent consultants with on-demand research tools. Feroze is now an MBA candidate at Harvard Business School and a Venture Partner at Contrary. Across roles, he’s built a reputation for clarity, rigor, and the ability to connect high-level strategy with early product execution.
Goals for the Summer: This summer, they’re taking a focused and hands-on approach – actively evaluating the new idea, building the early version of the platform, and deepening their conviction through conversations with users and domain experts.
Younghun Roh & Terry Kim — Scentra AI
Younghun and Terry are in the thick of early-stage exploration. Their legal venture name is currently Scentra AI, but like many founders in motion, they’re still shaping both the product and its final direction.
They began the Pearce Fellowship with an ambitious concept: an AI-powered chemical analysis tool built for the fragrance and flavor industries — sectors that rely heavily on sensory outcomes but lack deep technical infrastructure. Their insight was sharp: most companies don’t know the exact compound composition of their products, and current tools fail to identify up to 80% of compounds in coffee or perfume. Their solution aimed to automate compound identification, making advanced analytical chemistry accessible to non-experts. Initial traction included multiple design partners, a paying customer, and a research partnership with MIT.
Now, they’re pivoting toward a new opportunity, exploring agentic AI use cases for restaurants, particularly in sales, marketing, and operational intelligence. The shift builds on their core strengths: fast, intelligent analysis layered over complex, real-world data.
Younghun (Hoon) Roh is a Computer Science student at MIT with deep technical experience across software engineering, physics, and AI systems. He has worked as a researcher at MIT’s Parallel Algorithms Group, developed high-performance concurrent algorithms, and published academic work in computer science. In industry, he’s held roles as an AI researcher at MindsLab, first engineer at an ex-OpenAI founded startup, and most recently, Technical Lead at Sendbird, a unicorn-stage startup delivering AI-powered customer support tools. His experience spans pre-seed to scale, and he brings the full technical toolkit required to build from zero to one.
Terry Kim, also at MIT, is a senior who took time off to dive into coffee science — leading research at the intersection of chemistry, taste, and machine learning. He has developed AI-driven tools for non-targeted chemical analysis as a research assistant in MIT’s Department of Chemistry. Previously, he was a teaching assistant and lead researcher in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, where he taught students to analyze coffee using spectroscopy and microscopy. His passion for flavor science runs deep — from time as a barista, to Director of IT at Stereoscope Coffee, to founder of Latte Lab, a coffee science community. He also founded TKSecure.Net LLC, where he served as an IT consultant.
Goals for the Summer: This summer, Younghun and Terry are focused on validating their pivot, expanding the platform’s technical capabilities, and deepening partnerships with industry experts. They’re also exploring a potential relocation to work more closely with design partners in Chicago or New Jersey — and to stay grounded in the real-world environments they’re building for.
Chris Molteno — ReportCaddy
In the heavily regulated world of energy and climate, compliance isn’t just a checklist — it’s a serious financial risk. Fines can reach up to $1.3 million per day per violation, and even small errors can carry massive consequences. For Chris Molteno, that reality isn’t just a statistic — it’s a problem worth solving.
With ReportCaddy, he’s creating an AI-powered platform that helps energy companies stay ahead of evolving regulatory demands. The product tracks requirements, automates reporting, parses data from systems like SharePoint, and delivers audit-ready outputs — turning a painful, manual, and expensive process into something faster, smarter, cheaper, and far less error-prone.
Chris Molteno brings a combination of technical depth, global experience, and founder grit. Originally from Cape Town, he began his career as an Innovation Engineer at Africa New Energies, before moving to London to consult on digital transformation at WM Reply. He then spent six years at Lightsource bp, one of the world’s leading solar energy developers, where he rose through the ranks and became Director of Commercial Investments. Now pursuing his MBA at Harvard, Chris is channeling everything he’s learned to address a challenge he’s seen firsthand— from engineering and operations to leadership and policy — into a platform designed to modernize compliance in the energy transition.
He’s receiving powerful technical support from John Teasdale, a software engineer with expertise in AI product development who built the MVP overnight after joining the team, and Greg Dilella, an electrical engineer and automation specialist now working full-time to scale the platform.
Goals for the Summer: This summer, Chris is focused on leveraging their first design partnership, converting early interest into paid pilots, and validating product-market fit with IPP (independent power producer) customers.
Backing Bold from Day Zero
Twelve Fellows. Seven ideas. One shared belief: that the future belongs to those who are brave enough to begin.
The Pearce Fellowship isn’t about polish. It’s about potential. It exists because John Pearce believed in backing people early, when all they have is a question, a spark, or the courage to start.
This summer, we’re proud to be in their corner — not just as investors, but as collaborators, cheerleaders, and community.
📅 Apply to join us at the Pearce Fellow Showcase on 13th of August!
